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Sunday, June 6, 2010

Open Thread

According to BBC News, BP says it is capturing 10,000 barrels a day, or about half or better, leaving 7,000 to 10,000 a day to leak into the gulf.

Quite a trick when 5,000 was originally estimated as the leak size.

Half fixed is not fixed ...Yesterday Dredd Blog pointed out that this administration still has not learned the lesson that Prevention beats all cures hands down.Oilah Akbar has been to Nigeria and to the Amazon, causing destruction there too:

“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants. (NY Times)

The oil baron CEO mentality must see themselves as better than other people who have to live with the destructive, toxic mess they impose around the world.Let's hope BP does not get control of space now:

"A multimillionaire's test rocket blasted off on its maiden voyage Friday and successfully reached orbit in a dry run for NASA's push to go commercial." (HuffPo)

Robert Reich says double dip recession ahead:

"The Labor Department reports this morning that the private sector added a measly 41,000 net new jobs in May. But at least 100,000 new jobs are needed every month just to keep up with population growth.

In other words, the labor market continues to deteriorate.

The average length of unemployment continues to rise -- now up to 34.4 weeks (up from 33 weeks in April). That's another record."

3 comments:

The "double dip recession" is actually just a full blown depression in disguise. The current pseudo-recovery is merely the result of unprecedented amounts of government funny money thrown at the problem, which for the most part merely replenished banks' balance sheets and executives' bonuses. The government no longer has the wiggle room to try such a maneuver again, and even if they did, it would only further delay and deepen the impact from the ultimate day of reckoning, which to my mind will be wholesale debt default after a nice period of hyper-inflation for an appetizer.

Obama's gonna get tagged with the debt tarball (nice double entendre, eh?) either way, as well he should. Yeah, he inherited the mess from Shrub, but he's done nothing to fix the problem and everthing to exacerbate it. Futher, he's continued every major Shrub policy without substantive change, so he'll be fully deserving of the public lynching (figurative, but who knows?) he'll get in 2010, if not sooner. Obama's GOP now as far as I'm concerned - he's dead to me.

And of course, the Gulf disaster (another interesting parallel, as the mideast oil producing region is usually referred to as "the Gulf") is enough to end his dreams of reelection all by itself. Of course the right wing doesn't have any answers either - far from it! - but it will be poetic justice and great theater watching the loud-mouthed bastards - they'll blame Obama for their failures - implode even more spectacularly.

I think its fair to call the final meltdown officially begun, although few official sources will (or can afford to) admit it. It'll take years or maybe even decades to fully progress, but for most (99% +) Americans, the road heads only downhill at an ever increasing gradient from here until we settle in a post cheap oil, post imperialist, post global financial future that looks nothing like today. It'll be painful on the way down, but future generations (if there are future generations) will never miss it.

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